Parameterized auxiliary selection

Auxiliary selection is paradoxical: categorical for some verb classes, indeterminate for others; inconsistent across languages; and misaligned with other diagnostics. After critiquing one solution to the paradox, the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (Sorace 2000), we propose an alternative: Parameterized Linking, which approaches the semantic underpinnings of the unaccusative/unergative distinction and the syntactic-semantic mapping in a parameterized way. Languages can differ either in the Conceptual Structure features on which their linking rules are built telicity, agentivity, locomotion or on the linking rules they choose, or both, leading to different intransitive mappings. Using sets of parameterized, interacting, but still deterministic linking rules, the model can allow two features to produce a single continuum of gradience, predicting a hierarchy in auxiliary selection both within and across languages.